With the improvement of technology, electronic devices are developed towards being small in size and light in weight. As for a printed circuit board, conventionally, operators insert an electronic component on the circuit board by a Dual Inline Package (DIP) manner. Using the DIP manner, the printed circuit board needs to be drilled to form several holes in which pins of the electronic component insert. However, such a structure may affect the distribution and disposition of the wires of the printed circuit board, so the volume of the printed circuit board cannot be reduced. Moreover, the pins of the printed circuit board may affect the total volume and weight.
In recent years, manufacturers developed a Surface Mount Technology (SMT) that a pin-type electronic component is packaged into a chip-type electronic component to become a Surface Mount Device (SMD) which is filled in a tube. The SMD is dropped from the tube and adhered and welded on the printed circuit board. In such a manner, the printed circuit board may not be drilled, and the printed circuit board may be manufactured into multiple layers, and the volume of the electronic component can be reduced. Thus, the volume and weight of the printed circuit board can be greatly reduced accordingly.
Conventionally, the tube is fixed on a carrier (or jig), and a nozzle of a robotic manipulator (namely, robot arm) picks up or sucks a material (namely, the electronic component) from the tube before placing the material on the printed circuit board. However, since the sizes of the tubes are different from each other, each tube needs to match its specific carrier. When the tube needs to be replaced by another one, the carrier which matches the original tube must be replaced by another corresponding one, too. The replacement of the new carrier may affect the manufacturing cost and efficiency. Furthermore, the tube may be attached on the carrier by tape, but this kind of fixation may not securely fix the tube, which makes the tube oblique. Therefore, the material may not be precisely located on the right position of the carrier.